Pinned to the board above my desk is the picture I took the day we brought Hayden home from the hospital. Because he’d spent his first week and half of life in a Plexiglas box, he’d had to wait until he was eleven days old to meet his brother. Galen caught his first glimpse of Hayden when the nurse helped us strap him into the car, but since Katherine rode home in the middle of the back seat, it’s fair to say the boys weren’t properly introduced until we’d brought them inside, propped Galen against the arm of our unblemished couch, buttressed him with pillows, and laid Hayden in his arms. Galen’s cheeks were red from the early March wind, his hair as orange as a lit match. Hayden’s eyes were clamped shut, his lips pursed as if expecting a kiss. Galen looked up and smiled, beatific and protective, and I happened to be standing with the camera at the perfect angle. Most of my photographs come out blurry or with the frame askew, but this one was pure gold. We sent it to our friends and families to announce Hayden’s birth. For the rest of that year, I saw it hanging on the refrigerator of almost every house I visited.
What the photograph doesn’t show, what Galen’s angelic face and Hayden’s kissy face, in fact, obscure, are the events that transpired ten minutes later. I was feeding Hayden a bottle of his foul-smelling, NICU-concocted formula when Galen came galloping across the living room and dove at his brother’s face. There was no reason for Galen to do this other than he was two and Hayden had consumed more of his fair share of Mom and Dad’s attention in the last weeks. I ducked my head as Galen leapt. He largely rolled across my back and onto the carpet, though not before getting a hand on the bottle and knocking it from Hayden’s mouth. Hayden let loose a wail that was as good a sign as any that his lungs were recovering from the illness that had delayed his homecoming for an extra nine days.
Here’s the thing: at eleven days old, the idea of an older brother was no more sensible to Hayden than zebra mussels or deep-dish pizza. But as I watched him scream and tried to soothe him, I swore—hand to God—he was milking it.
Nine years later, their dynamic hadn’t much changed.
One night Katherine and I were enjoying a glass of wine on our new leather sofa an hour after the boys had gone up to bed when we heard the ceiling creak. We stopped to listen. We heard Galen get out of bed, cross the hallway, release the shower rod, and storm into Hayden’s room to beat on his sleeping brother. Once Hayden came to enough to recognize what was happening, he screamed like he was being stabbed in the eyeball with a fork.
“What the hell are you doing?” I called up the stairs.
“I’m bored!” Galen called back.
Hayden whimpered in the darkness behind him. “He’s an asshole. Keep him away from me.”
It often seemed to Katherine and me that the boys were in a bad marriage. They couldn’t get along, but they couldn’t leave each other alone. They didn’t share a room, but they shared everything else, including underwear and socks and, on most out-of-town trips, a toothbrush. They’d bathed together until Galen swore off baths in favor of showers, and wherever we went, whether across the country or across town, they were stuck together in the back seat. Familiarity breeds contempt, and they were more familiar with each other than any two people on the planet.
If they fought hard enough, we’d send Galen to the basement and Hayden to his room, to put as much space as possible between them. But neither could stand the separation for more than a few minutes. Each was remarkably noiseless when moving through the house in search of the other, and though at first they sounded happy to be reunited, their giggles were a prologue to the inevitable. A nonchalant graze to Galen’s elbow while sharing the couch would be answered with a heel driven into Hayden’s thigh, who in turn would commence an Apache war scream as he scrambled to the arm of the couch and lunged headfirst for Galen’s balls. It happened that fast: elbow graze to groin blow in under thirty seconds. Long before he learned to use the potty or pronounce the letter K, Hayden figured out that a shot to the jewels could fell his enemy more efficiently than an attack on any other body part. He saw no reason to waste time punching elsewhere. Galen’s been hit in the baby maker so many times that it’ll be a miracle if he’s one day able to have children.
Where does this insatiable need to fight come from? Conventional wisdom says it’s the Y chromosome—that all young bulls, whether bison, bottlenose dolphins, or boys, are predisposed to lock horns with one other. But in Testosterone Rex: Myths of Science, Sex, and Society, psychologist Cordelia Fine argues against the idea that testosterone incites men and boys to fight. “Although we’re used to thinking of certain kinds of behavior as ‘testosterone fueled,’” Fine writes, “in many cases it would make more sense to instead think of actions and situations as being ‘testosterone fueling.’ Social context modulates T levels (up or down), which influences behavior (presumably via changes in perception, motivation, and cognition), which influences social outcome, which influences T levels . . . and so on.” Fine cites a study in which male college students were bumped on the shoulder by a decoy who “added insult to injury” by muttering an offensive word. For the students raised in cultures rooted in male honor and status, the confrontation was correlated with increased aggression and elevated testosterone levels.
Back when Katherine was pregnant with Galen, and especially once we learned we’d be having a boy, we spent a long time talking about how most brands of masculinity hawked to young men celebrated, if not directly encouraged, violence. Video-game soldiers taking aim at enemy combatants, hockey players throwing down their gloves, Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings with his Jesus haircut and Excalibur sword chopping off the heads of orcs with every swing of his arm. We deliberately set out to shield the boys from such influences, hoping to raise gentle, peace-loving souls. We asked our families not to send the boys cap guns or plastic swords or slingshots. If such toys arrived, we endured the boys’ tears and complaints when we took the weapons away. The same went with video games and movies: Super Mario Bros. was okay; Resident Evil was not. When the boys pretended to stab and shoot each other with their fingers, Katherine sat them down and told stories from her nights working in the emergency room (in hindsight a bad idea, because soon after, Galen started telling the neighbors that his mom knew a lot of people who’d been stabbed and shot). We even made honest efforts to resist the crude gender divisions that separated the cheap plastic crap sold to boys from the cheap plastic crap sold to girls. When Galen announced he wanted a Cra-Z-Loom for Christmas, we were all for it. Weave away, dude. Hayden was gaga for his Easy-Bake Oven until he figured out the real oven could produce a much greater quantity of brownies in a fraction of the time.
And yet, despite our efforts to fashion ourselves into pacifist-progressive parents, the boys couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Friends with daughters were scandalized by Galen’s and Hayden’s incessant need to drag each other to the ground and slap each other in the face. The fact that Hayden would deign to throw a dart at his brother’s leg was seen as inconvertible proof of moral turpitude, and an invitation to make backhanded comments about our parenting. You must be so patient to put up with all that chaos! Dads were the worst. I could see them thinking, as their princesses cowered behind their legs, If those were my boys, I’d rain down discipline like hot lead from a castle wall. The belief that one could muscle boys into submission stemmed from the same impulse, whether cultural or biological, that made boys want to fight in the first place. Boys fought to establish their places in the world and to protect what was theirs. Or short of that, simply to see who was stronger, badder, nastier.
My boys’ penchant for battle may not be fueled by testosterone, but it is undoubtedly biological in another, more specific way. As my sons, they’re the descendants of a long line of fighters. Not boxers so much as screamers, shouters, nostril-flarers, gold-medal dish-breakers. My forebears could hurl household objects with an almost artful flourish. My mother had a habit of chucking food down the kitchen hallway when she was upset. Whenever my sister and I heard her ranting in the kitchen, we knew to move carefully around the corner lest we take a jar of peanut butter in the eye. I once arrived at my grandparents’ house to find the pendant light hanging over the breakfast table missing one of its glass panels. My grandmother sheepishly confessed that she’d broken it by hurling raw brussels sprouts at my grandfather.
Katherine’s a thrower, too, and freely admits it. Her ancestors are Scottish to my Irish and most likely descended from William Wallace and his gang of blue-painted vandals. Her father, uncle, aunts, and grandmother for decades gathered for breakfast on Saturday mornings, an event so predictably pugilistic that my mother-in-law dubbed it the Family Feud. Each week my father-in-law swore he was never going back, but the next Saturday he did, called by the siren of war. I was drawn to Katherine’s never-back-down, die-before-surrender spirit that I rightly believed was the hallmark of an uncommon strength, one belied by her small size, her deep laugh, her daily mission to aid the sick and the helpless. In her years as a hospital social worker, she was screamed at, lunged at, swung at, kicked to the ground, and she never once shied away from the job. I found it reassuring that my occasional temper didn’t scare her off. She was used to putting up with hotheads, and she didn’t take any shit.
Her ferocity could even come in handy. I was once struggling to install a wrought-iron coat hook beside the front door, cranking with all my might to get the screws anchored into the brick wall behind the plaster. After a sweaty and fruitless half an hour, I went to the couch where Katherine was reading and watching me struggle. I insulted her until her face reddened—comments about a woman’s figure, I’ve found, tend to work particularly fast—and when she stood up from the couch I handed her the screwdriver. She had the hook moored tight to the wall in under five minutes. She turned to me, Phillips-head still in her hand, and said, “You’re lucky that went your way, Ace.” Indeed.
More than any other day of the week, Saturday was our fighting day. When it grew too cold to shoo the boys outside or send them on their bikes to the pool, they turned into a pair of crickets trapped in the same jar. They could slug it out for twelve hours straight with only short breaks to raid the fridge and pee in the snow. The size of our house and the boys’ growing heights were undoubtedly mitigating factors. We were essentially four adult-sized bodies competing for space, bumping into one another in the hallways and kitchen. Katherine and I argued more on Saturdays, too. Saturday was the day we waited all week to arrive, our chance to sleep in and catch up on housework, to do everything and nothing in the same day. One way or another, Saturday usually ended in frustration and disappointment.
The boys had been going at each other all day, the walls and ceiling rattling like the world’s longest freight train was running beneath the house. By the midafternoon, they’d dug into their positions. Galen was in the alcove behind the upstairs half bathroom, Hayden in the built-in shelves hidden beside his bed. From there they’d been launching sorties, storming across the hall, seizing something from the other’s room—headphones, baseball cards, petty cash, the last of their candy stashes—before hauling ass back to base. The floor of Hayden’s room looked like a table at a flea market, his brother’s most cherished possessions laid out for sale. I tried to broker peace, first with appeals to filial loyalty, then with bribes, then, finally, with threats. Having already lost the things they cared most about, neither was in the mood to bargain. The only thing they could agree on was to keep fighting.
By four that afternoon, I’d grown so exasperated that I ordered them into their jackets and gloves and put the dog on her leash. I gave them both plastic grocery sacks and said they were not allowed back in the house until they’d each collected a fresh turd. I wanted to see evidence. Two dumps by our little beagle meant that they’d be out for at least a half an hour.
“Does the poo have to be Allie’s?” Hayden asked. I could see the cogs in his mind cranking. Would my son shit in a plastic sack in freezing weather to stick it to the old man? I didn’t have a doubt. “If it’s anything but Allie’s poo, you won’t see the light of day for weeks.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “Walk together, get along. This shouldn’t be hard.”
“It shouldn’t be,” Hayden said, a wry smirk curling the side of his mouth. “But it be.”
Twenty minutes later, they came down the street, plastic sacks a-swinging. At the edge of our lawn they joined hands and skipped past the window. Their mouths were open and they were laughing, and from a certain angle they looked like each other’s closest pals. They knew I was watching. Hayden turned toward the window, and I saw the devilish grin that told me everything I needed to know. They might as well have shot me the middle finger.
I met them at the back door. “Jackets and shoes off and come with me,” I said. I pushed the living room chairs against the wall and the big faux-leather ottoman we used in lieu of a coffee table against the window. “If you’re eager to fight, then okay,” I said. “Let’s fight.”
I made them take off their shirts. The rules, I said, were simple. No punching in the face or below the waist. I pointed at Hayden, “That means no shots to the ham and eggs.” When one said he was finished, the fight was over. First one to quit is the loser. Afterward, everyone got his stuff back. “Clear?” I asked.
“Clear,” they parroted. They’d been waiting a long time for this.
“Shake hands, gentlemen.” They shook warily, giggling, and then went at each other without bothering to let go. They spun in a circle, hands joined like the knife-wielding thugs in Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” video. Galen kicked Hayden in the thigh while Hayden whiffed his knuckles at Galen’s shoulder. They jerked away from each other’s grip, and Galen leapt up onto the ottoman and commenced an elaborate display of karate chops and high kicks, punching at the air and gritting his teeth. Hay-yah! Hayden was so transfixed that he failed to get out of the way, even though Galen didn’t attempt to land a blow until the end of his routine. The chop to Hayden’s arm sent him reeling backward, his hand at the wound and his bottom lip quivering.
“You can quit anytime,” I said. “Just say the word.”
Hayden ignored me and trained his gaze on his brother’s long alabaster torso. Galen juked and jived, but Hayden had a bead on his target. He powered through the karate barrage and landed a slap to Galen’s bare belly so loud it drew Katherine from the other room to investigate. “Ouch,” she said.
Galen stared down at his stomach. Before our eyes, the crimson imprint of Hayden’s hand came into view, the palm and all five fingers. Galen clutched his stomach, doubled over, and began to cry. Hayden’s arm was red, too, and a welt was forming, but in his moment of triumph he’d forgotten the pain. He arched his back and beat his fists against his chest in a full-throated Tarzan yell.
“Are you ready to stop yet?” I asked Galen.
He looked at me like I’d suggested leaving an amusement park after only one ride. “No way,” he said. “I’m going to kick his ass.”
“Language!” Katherine said.
Hayden swiped the tips of his nostrils with his thumbs. He bounced on his toes. “Come and get some, butt munch.”
We’ve all seen the couple fighting at the gas station, the mall, the moderately fancy restaurant. Instead of concluding with coffee and dessert, dinner ends with a linen napkin tossed over a half-eaten filet and the chair wobbling as the husband or wife stomps away. The abandoned spouse is left staring into his water glass to avoid the stares of the haughty pricks in the dining room while the waiter scurries over with the bill. I’ve seen it at least a dozen times, and I’ve shot rooms full of strangers the look a time or two myself. Arguments between couples who’ve been together a long time have a tendency to rise up out of nowhere like a tsunami; the worst fights come from our deepest submarine trenches, our long histories of past disputes and unrequited good intentions, all the little things that lie dormant ninety-nine percent of the time. There’s something cathartic about a good brawl, too, because it clears our closets of its skeletons. I’ve found that fighting can be a uniquely intimate experience, full of all the heat and ardor of sex, only without the bliss. And therein lies the problem. Allowed to burn unchecked, catharsis can turn caustic.
Even with all the clarity afforded by hindsight, it’s difficult to pinpoint the epicenter of the quake between Katherine and me that Saturday last winter. I didn’t wreck the car or blow our savings on Internet poker or disappear on a three-day bender. As best I can recall, I was tired. It had been a long week; I’d worked straight through a two-day blizzard to make a magazine deadline while the boys, snowed out of school, had treated their bedrooms and the living room like Keith Richards at the Riot House. The storm had also caused havoc at the hospital, leaving the units Katherine managed short-staffed. She spent most of the morning on the phone, begging nurses to give up their Saturday nights to cover a shift from nine p.m. to three a.m. Not exactly a prime draw. Her phone and pager were ringing nonstop, and she kept closing herself inside the back room to talk, leaving me to run interference with the boys, who were supposed to be cleaning their rooms but were instead hiding with their iPods and bickering. It wasn’t fair, I thought, how I got stuck holding the bag of housework and kids while Katherine sat on her phone and fiddled with the spreadsheet on her computer. I swore I saw her looking at blogs about clothes and shoes while she waited for a nurse to call her back. By the time the sun set, the day felt wasted. Katherine was massaging her temples with her index fingers, the boys’ rooms were dirtier than ever, and I wanted only to eat dinner and slump on the couch and watch a movie.
Katherine asked me to get a bowl down from a high shelf in the cupboard. As I was fetching it, I bumped her forehead with my elbow. She scowled at me like I’d done it on purpose. “That didn’t hurt,” I said.
“It hurt some,” she said, rubbing her forehead.
“I’ve been doing chores all day, so maybe you could give me a break.”
“Changing the sheets and running the vacuum doesn’t help my face feel better,” she shot back.
“A little grace would be nice,” I said. “You don’t have to get so upset.”
She dropped the bowl on the counter and marched swiftly away from the kitchen. She tried to lock herself in the bathroom, but I stuck my foot between the door and the jamb before she could slam it shut. I wasn’t finished yet. “Stop playing the victim,” I shouted. “I was doing you a favor.”
“I never said you weren’t.” She started to cry and turned toward the shower. “Leave me alone.”
I didn’t want to leave her alone. She was blowing everything out of proportion. It was almost seven o’clock, and I could feel our Saturday night, like the day, on the verge of slipping away. The prospect of a ruined night redoubled my anger to the point that I was yelling at the top of my lungs. I recognized the irony, even at the time, but I couldn’t stop myself. William James famously argued that external stimuli led to physiological responses that resulted in emotion, rather than the other way around. Fear or anger were the products of a quickened heart rate, for example. The theory had never been more true than right then. The look on Katherine’s face said she was nowhere near backing down. I didn’t want her to. I wanted her fury to match my own so that I could continue to holler. After a while, the argument had generated enough hurtful things—accusations launched with such ill-advised phrases as “You always” and “You never”—to keep itself going indefinitely. It was making its own fuel.
I chased my wife from the bathroom to the bedroom to the basement and back again to the kitchen because I hated it when she shut me out and she hated it when I boxed her in. Each room offered new indictments until the original offense, the elbow to the forehead, was burned up like a wad of newspaper between two logs in a bonfire. The argument reached its apogee when Katherine grabbed the car keys and threatened to leave and I punched the bathroom door so hard I felt something crack in my hand. Three weeks later, when I could still barely hold a pen, an X-ray would confirm that I’d broken my fifth metacarpal, an injury known as a boxer’s fracture.
The boys had retreated to the living room when the fighting started. They tried to drown us out with the television, but as the argument raged on, they’d had to move farther out of the way until they ended up sitting on the stairs together, the lights turned off as if to hide from us. I’d seen them there as I motored past, but I’d never stopped to reassure them. The clock on the microwave went from seven to eight and then to nine while Katherine and I were howling at each other. I’d fulfilled my own malicious prophecy.
“The boys can hear you,” Katherine shouted at one point. We were in the guest room across from the stairs. I cradled my right hand in my left. “They can hear everything you say. Is this how you want them to know their dad?”
“I don’t care!” I shouted back. “I don’t care if the whole block hears me.”
Though of course I cared. I’d cared a great deal. My temper had gotten the better of me. It had flared up against the person I loved most in the world and had made a mockery of everything I’d ever said to the boys about treating other people, especially women (and of all women, especially their mom) with respect. Already I felt ashamed, even if couldn’t admit it.
The bedroom door creaked open, and Hayden stepped inside. “I wish you’d stop,” he said. In his face, I saw the fear I had discovered when I was about his age. The terror of my own parents fighting and the desperation that accrued with each new argument until I began to grasp that the life I’d always taken for granted as durable was in fact vulnerable to shattering and collapsing. Weeks before my parents told my sister and me that they were separating, I’d sensed it coming. The air in our house had thickened in the same way the sky takes on a dull, flat charge in the hours before a thunderstorm. When they finally brought my sister and me into their bedroom and told us they needed time apart, it felt as though the rain I’d been watching gather had finally come down. There was no surprise in it, only grief. I’d learned the hard way that some arguments were more than passing squalls that rattled the windows in their panes. Some fights could blow down the entire house.
The night before he left Texas, after paying the check at Daddy Did It Fish House, Dad took Devin and me home for the last time. My mother waited in the entryway when we pulled in. Dad usually dropped us off, waving goodbye from behind the wheel as we opened the front door, but that night he shut off the engine and came inside. The papers were signed and filed, the furniture divided, my dad’s portion packed on the moving truck that would ferry it to California. After that night, we’d never again stand together, the four of us, in the entryway of the house we’d shared. Devin and I showed Mom our bags of stamped cards and told her about the pictures we’d seen of Dad’s new place in California. Dad stood with his back to the door, his hand on Devin’s shoulder. My stepmom’s maroon Oldsmobile looked foreign sitting in the driveway, a stark reminder that this was happening. He was going. This was the end. My mom said to him, “I’m never going to see you again.” This was the first time they’d seen each other without their lawyers present in nearly six months. “Give me a hug,” Dad said, and for a long moment they held each other. My mom laid her head on his shoulder. They’d see each other on a few occasions after that night, at our graduations from high school and college, our weddings; over time they’d learn to come together when circumstances required with grace and equanimity approaching an old friendship. But I can’t recall them ever touching after this moment.
Looking down at Hayden, I saw in vivid detail every second of that night, the memory so fresh and raw it could have happened that day instead of three decades ago. I touched the back of his head. A jolt of pain shot up my arm from my broken hand. “I’m sorry,” I said. I turned to Katherine and said it directly to her, “I’m sorry.” Had I said it in the first place, before I’d ever set the bowl on the counter, I could have avoided the entire blowup.
“Me, too,” Katherine said, wiping her eyes.
The door widened further, and Galen came in. He put one hand on his mother’s shoulder and the other on mine and winched us close. “Kiss and make up,” he said. It wasn’t a request.
“Not yet,” I said, a little too sharply. I was still calming down.
“Are you going to get divorced?” he asked. He grinned like he was joking, but he smiled when he was most afraid.
“No,” I said. I put my arms around Katherine. I felt her stiffen and then exhale against me. “Don’t worry. Mom and Dad love each other. We were upset.”
That seemed to appease the boys for the moment. Enough, in any case, for Galen to let go and step back. One more memory flooded in: the day I sensed the weight of the strife between my parents and asked my mother the same question Galen had asked me. Are you going to get divorced? Of course not, she’d said.
Before going to bed that night, I stepped into the frozen night air to let the dog pee and to take out the trash. The tops of my ears turned hard in less time than it took Allie to sniff out a spot to squat, but the cold against my hand felt good. The dome of the night was dense with stars. I let out a long breath and then drew my own steam back inside my lungs, full of regret for the awful things I’d allowed my sons to hear come out of my mouth, the image they now had of their father stomping from room to room. Chances were good they’d never forget it. The night would burrow into their subconscious and wait to be called back up the next time their mom and I argued, or years from now, when they found themselves disagreeing with a person they loved.
The boys had been slugging it out for forty minutes, and there was no end in sight. Their backs and chests and bellies were splotched red. No blood had been drawn, but they’d both absorbed plenty of hard blows. It was time to ring the final bell. A draw was a more than respectable way to end a match. “How about the two of you shake hands, and then I’ll get you a snack?” I said.
“Fine,” Hayden said, and stuck out his palm. Galen accepted it, his other hand protecting his groin. Given his opponent, it was an understandable posture. “It’s over,” I said. “Shaking hands means you accept the outcome of the contest. No more punching. Got it?”
“Okay,” they said. I pulled the ottoman back to the center of the living room and fished between the sofa cushions until I found the remote. I followed Katherine around the corner to the kitchen. I slid a bag of popcorn into the microwave while she uncorked a bottle of chardonnay. “How long do you think they would have kept going?” she asked.
“Till they dropped,” I said. I got a bowl out of the cupboard, this time making sure Katherine was well clear of my elbows. “Hayden fights like you.”
“What’s that now?”
“He’s small, but he fights hard. Dirty, if he has to.”
“I fight to win.”
“I rest my case, your honor.” I emptied the popcorn into a bowl and carried it around the corner. At the edge of the living room I stopped and waited for Katherine to catch up. I wanted her to see. Galen lay on the ottoman on his belly, his chin resting on his hands. Hayden straddled his back. Together they stared at the TV. While Katherine and I looked on, Hayden reached down and raked his fingers through his brother’s hair. Galen dropped his head so Hayden could tickle the back of his neck. The boys knew by instinct what I needed to remember: Far worse than losing a fight was the prospect of being apart.